Fester's Quest
by Akktri
Summary: Fester and the Addams family face off against an alien invasion. Inspired by the Sunsoft video game.
1. Chapter 1: The Quest

The Fester's Quest video game has very little plot or dialog to it. Most of it is done wordlessly, and bears no resemblance to the television show. I enjoy the challenge of writing a story for a video game that has none, so I was either going to write a fanfic about Tiger Heli, or this game. After watching an entire DVD collection of the Addamses, I decided to put Tiger Heli on the backburner (or is that the Afterburner?).

It looked like an abandoned property. An old run-down Victorian mansion framed with rusty wrought iron fencing and a jungle of weeds. But there were people on the roof, ghoulish looking individuals in strange clothing.  
It was night, the stars and a brilliant moon providing the only illumination to the darkened aboveground patio, but these pale strangers acted like they were on vacation in Cancun.  
Near the edge, a mustached man with slicked down hair and a striped full body swimsuit peered through an enormous telescope while puffing away on a cigar. Behind him, a vampire-like impossibly slender woman in a black dress sat enthroned on a wicker chair, holding a mirror to her face like she were tanning herself.  
Next to her stood an immense stern looking man with matted hair who bore a striking resemblance to Frankenstein's monster. At the other end of the roof, a squatty bald man in a monk's robe lay sprawled in a lawn chair with a folding mirror framing his face, presumably to refract the moon's rays for a perfect tan.  
Near his elbow, an old crone of a woman in rags boiled something foul smelling in a cauldron, ocassionally dropping bugs and dandruff into the mix as she stirred it.  
"How's your tan coming, Fester?" the witchy woman nearly cackled.  
The fat man frowned. "It could be better! Do you have anything better than lanolin?"  
"I've got just the thing." She held up a ladle full of dark, smoking liquid. "Here. Try this. It'll give your skin that perfect greenish cast!"  
Grinning, the man grabbed the ladle, pouring it into his mouth. "Delicious!"  
The white haired woman scowled at him in dismay. "Fester! That's supposed to go on your face!"  
Fester shrugged. "It'll get there eventually!"  
The man with the mustache puffed like a chimney, moving the telescope sideways.  
"Gomez dear," the woman in black called from her wicker throne. "Shouldn't you be aiming the telescope higher?"  
"What, and miss all the fun on the ground?"  
Suddenly, the sky got a whole lot brighter than it should have been.  
Fester shook his head in disappointment. "Helicopters again?" he moaned. "Don't we have enough of those clogging up our beautiful swamps already?"  
"You're right, dear," the dark woman sighed. "A 747 would be more striking. C'est la vie."  
A look of mischief brightened the mustached man's face. "Tish! That's French!"  
The woman lazily extended a bony arm, receiving a flurry of kisses from wrist to bicep.  
The light got brighter, and a loud humming filled the air. It didn't sound like a helicopter or any known aircraft. The sound was otherworldly, alternating between the hum of a floor buffer on steroids and the groan of a G key on an oversized pipe organ.  
The entire mansion rattled and shook with the vibrations, the shutters clapping, the glass in the windows trembling in their frames. The pot of boiling sludge tipped and splashed all over the patio.  
The old woman angrily shook her ladle at the blinding light. "If only Isoceles was back from Dr. Mobogo's!" she shouted. "I'd show you a thing or two!"  
Fester donned a pair of reflector sunglasses and the thing gained definition. The object was disk shaped, and appeared to be the size of a major metropolitan city. Jagged towers and turrets jutted out all around its center, and pinpoints of light, presumably windows, could be seen all along its surfaces.  
The fat man bolted to his feet, his eyes wide and bulging in their skeletal sockets. His mirror fell and shattered to the ground. The old lady muttered something about seven more wonderful years, but he ignored it. "Gomez!" he shrieked. "It's a flying saucer! A UFO!"  
Gomez, still chomping his cigar, dashed back to the telescope, turning it upward. "By Jove, you're right! An actual unidentified flying object! And it's hovering over our cemetary!"  
"Dear," Tish said in a dreamy tone. "Do you remember the last time we got abducted?"  
Gomez drew close to her, a grin spreading under his mustache as he gazed into her eyes. "Remember! How can I forget! Naked and starving for five weeks! Our only sustenance a glowing slime that left us half blind with sores all over our tongues and made us vomit out of our eyeballs! And those anal probes! Exquisite!" He could have been describing a pleasant vacation to Maui. "I couldn't sit down for months!" And then he stared up at the light with a wistful expression on his face, like he'd gladly do it again.  
The Frankenstein man shuddered, slowly shaking his head. "Ughhhhh."  
As the house continued to shake, Gomez's telescope took a nose dive off the stoop, shattering to pieces in front of a headstone in the yard below.  
There was a brilliant flash, then the old hag was suddenly gone.  
"Grandma!" Fester shouted. "Where's Grandma!"  
"I'm not sure," said Tish. "But mama moves rather quickly when she runs out of strychnine!"  
His face took on the appearance of a fat baby with indigestion. "Well I don't think that's it at all! I think the aliens took her!"  
"Strychnine doesn't have the right consistency for moonblock," she agreed. "It's like they say: Some things are better left for the experts. And Mama is an expert."  
"And our expert is up there in that blasted flying saucer!"  
Gomez took the cigar out of his mouth, giving his companion a bemused smirk. "To think we spent all that money on those colonoscopies!"  
The light abruptly shut off, and they were left in the moonlight again. Fester frowned at the object, visible only by its hundreds of tiny glowing windows. "Well, she always said she wanted to get away from it all!"


	2. Chapter 2: Blunderbuss

In a dimly lit dungeon in the crumbling underbelly of the mansion, the bald man sat with his lumpy head in a vice while the tall Frankenstein man slowly cranked it tighter. His eyes, ringed by heavy dark circles, stared sullenly into space.  
"Oh, it's just no use!" he pouted.  
"What's the matter, Fester?" said a little waif-like girl in a black dress standing among a collection of medieval torture devices.  
Fester moaned in reply. "Oh Wednesday, my head just isn't limber enough without grandma's moon tonic!"  
"When do you think she'll be back?"  
"It's difficult to say," said the talking head in the vice. "The last time Gomez and Morticia were in Roswell, they were gone for an entire year. But when they got abducted at Devil's Tower, it was only a week. Depends on the alien, I guess."  
"I hope she gets home soon. The demon in the hall closet is trying to get out again."  
Fester dismissively waved his hand. "Pshaw. That demon's always trying to get out."  
"Not like it used to."  
Fester let out an exasperated sigh.  
The tall man gave the vice another quarter turn.  
"I thought this vice would relieve the tension, but it's only making things worse! I'm just worried sick about grandma! Let me out, Lurch!"  
The tall man didn't comply, giving the vice another twist.  
"Then why don't you rescue her?" the girl said.  
The bald guy was so startled by the thought that he knocked something loose on the vice.  
"Rescue! What do I look like, Superman?"  
"A man on TV said that you don't have to have superpowers to be a hero."  
"We should have put that rotten box in the junker years ago when we had the chance!" he grumbled.  
"It wasn't just grandma," said Wednesday. "The whole city disappeared last night. If you can rescue them from the aliens, you'll be a hero!"  
"Wednesday, you sure know how to take the wind out of someone's sails!"  
The giant man released him from the vice.  
"If you want me, I'll be in the iron maiden!"  
The girl walked away with a look of disappointment on her face. This troubled Fester, but he couldn't stomach the idea of being pigeonholed as a world famous alien hunter. The last thing he wanted was fame. Unlike his brother Gomez, he shunned the spotlight. He cringed at the thought of being made a local celebrity, a civic leader or a politician. He wouldn't know what to do. It was Gomez that had all the good ideas for community growth, like the campaign to save the swamps, and the wonderful school with the demolition classes. The idea of the limelight frightened him so badly that he preferred to close himself inside a coffin full of pointy knives instead. Not that he minded being impaled by pointy knives, of course.  
And so he just sat there in the dark, glumly staring through the crack in the lid. Fester always enjoyed a good sulk, and this one was no exception.  
Unfortunately, he only managed to get in an hour's worth of sulking time before the sight of a strange mutant creature crawling up the dungeon walls distracted him.  
"Not again!" he moaned as he gazed at the eight legged faceless thing. "You spray and spray and they keep on coming back! What do you guys have against dungeons, anyway?" He burst from the iron maiden with the air of a man beset with a tedious chore, and, with one quick movement, he had the thing impaled on spikes inside the maiden, splurting gobs of black blood every which way. "Ruin a good iron maiden! That tears it!" Fester cried. "These aliens have to go!" And he stomped up the dungeon staircase with a determined scowl on his face.  
Gomez was doing headstands on the foyer floor again, the Frankenstein man playing a jaunty tune on a harpsichord in the back corner for ambiance. Dressed in a pinstriped suit, the Clark Gable lookalike suspended himself upside down, puffing his cigar. "It sure is quiet without mama's alligator wrestling," he remarked. "Ordinarily at this time of day, you could hear her screams all the way to the front porch!"  
"You're right, Gomez," the woman in black said as she shoveled a scoop of hamburger into a man eating plant. "It was either the sound of screams, or her cauldron exploding. Sometimes both."  
"Fester and mama are so much alike, it's uncanny!" he grinned.  
Fester stepped over a scary looking bear skin rug, scowling at the upside down face on the floor. "Gomez, have you seen my blunderbuss?"  
"Speak of the devil!" Gomez laughed. "I'd help you, but be darned if I can't remember where I last saw it."  
"Dear," said Morticia. "Didn't you take your gun down to the caves when we had our last picnic?"  
Fester snapped his fingers. "That's it! The grotto! I was teaching Thor how to play fetch!"  
"That's the spirit, Fester! Wrestling your blunderbuss out of that gator's innards is a surefire way to get your mind off your troubles!"  
"Gee, I hope so!"  
A sharp rapping suddenly sounded from a small wooden box on a table next to a taxidermy animal and a suit of armor. The raps continued in staccato patterns like morse code.  
"I believe Thing has something to give you," Gomez smirked. "He says you might need it!"  
A rusty hinge on the box squealed loudly as a large hand popped out, bearing a bullwhip in its clutches.  
Fester took it. "Thank you, Thing, though I'm not really sure I need it."  
"What about self flagellation?" the woman asked.  
A smile broadened on Fester's face. "Oh yeah! That's a great idea! Thing, you're so thoughtful!"  
The hand snapped its fingers and jabbed a digit in his direction, as if to say, "We're tight." It then grabbed a handle inside the box lid, pulling it down with a squeal.  
"With a little love, you can tease that whip into a cat of nine tails. All you need to do is find some broken glass."  
"No one teases better than you, my dear," Gomez remarked.  
Morticia smiled.  
A doorway beneath a moose head with crooked antlers led to a hallway occupied by a menacing looking African lion. AFter wrestling with it for a bit and getting clawed in the face a few times, Fester gave it a scratch behind the ears and waddled down to the ballroom at the end of the passage, periodically flogging himself with the whip for personal amusement.  
A trapdoor in the room's dusty marble flooring connected Fester to a narrow tunnel carved out of rock, then a large cavern with dripping stalactites and a scattering of occult paraphernalia. He stuck a light bulb in his mouth, which illuminated the dark cave until he neared the opening at the opposite end. Beyond this lay the swamps, a grimy, foggy bog filled with scraggly weeping willow trees, drooping cattails and dried up crusty lotus pods. The bugs swarmed in Fester's face, which he swatetd away in annoyance as he continued onward down a muddy embankment.  
Thor the alligator had beached himself a few yards down the muddy shore, and he didn't look so hot. The scales on the seventeen foot beast were pale, cracked and drooping, its grimy yellow teeth dangling loose in its blackened gums. Its body was bloated, swollen like a balloon, its puffy closed lidded eyes taking on the shape of large potatoes.  
The rusty old bluderbuss lay directly beneath the creature's jaw.  
"Oh Thor!" Fester cried. 'What happened to you! Tesk, tsk, what a waste."  
Shaking his head, Fester tugged on the gun, but the corpse's jaw was heavy, so he had to use both hands, and even with that, it was slow going. The carcass seemed to shudder as he did this, but he figured it was his imagination.  
He changed his mind when a claw moved and he heard a tail splashing in the water.  
"Thor!" Fester shouted with glee. "You're alive!"  
The creature's heavy lidded eyes flew open, revealing milk white pupils.  
"What terrific luck!" Fester smiled. "An undead alligator to call my very own!"  
When the beast's mouth burst open, he discovered he was slightly wrong.  
Immediately, a huge mass of tentacles, eyestalks and razor tipped barbs exploded from the open maw.  
At the same time, the gator's head split apart from its body with a messy tearing sound and a green cloud of noxious vapor. Tiny legs burst through its skin, dragging it closer and closer to the hem of his dirty brown robe.  
"Oh goody!" Fester exclaimed, rubbing his hands together. "And I was just wondering what I would have for lunch!"


	3. Chapter 3: Globular Clusters

A gray-yellow fog of foul gas drifted across the swamps on the Addams' estate, obscuring the sun and sky so that it was impossible to tell the time of day. The muddy algae crusted waters boiled like rotten pea soup on low heat. The whole place sounded like a stomach with indigestion, and bats flitted among the dead trees.  
On the shore of a particularly smelly bog, Uncle Fester lay on a muddy river bank, grinning crazily at the giant swollen zombie alligator head that had him wrapped in dozens of muscular tentacles, dragging him into its gaping maw.  
"Oh Thor, you old joker!" Fester laughed. "Oh, and I see you haven't seen anyone about that thirty third molar of yours." He squinted. "It actually looks a bit loose. Here. Let me fix that."  
Then he climbed inside the creature's mouth, yanking out a tooth.  
"There!"  
For a moment, he held it like a trophy as the tentacles pulled him in deeper, but then the thing let out a horrific shriek, and he was thrown clear across the bog, slamming headfirst into a gong Gomez had set up for the purpose of calling the butler.  
He'd set them up on posts every thirty yards around the place, which, in this instance, proved to be incredibly convenient.  
The moment his head bashed noisily into the thing and fallen on the ground, he saw the talk Frankenstein looking man standing over him, looking dismal and surly as usual.  
"You rang."  
He sat up, brushing himself off. "Lurch! Just the man I wanted to see!"  
The butler tensed up in apparent dread.  
Fester pointed at the monster. "My blunderbuss is caught in the clutches of that creature! Could you get it back for me?"  
The giant shuddered, rolled his eyes, and slowly shook his head.  
"Oh, and find my whip. I lost it somewhere when I was getting thrown."  
Lurch knelt on the ground, grabbing something beneath his feet. He thrust it into Fester's hands.  
"Whip," he said really slowly.  
"Thank you lurch!"  
"Yourrrre welcome," he muttered.  
Lurch marched across the swamp in the Fester pointed, his mannerism reflecting the casual distaste of one putting trash on the curb.  
Fester rubbed his hands together in eager anticipation.  
In one quick movement, the butler smashed a fist into the mutant alligator head, knocking it off its crab legs.  
His hand whipped in and out of the creature's mouth, and Fester saw him slowly trudging back up to him.  
He found the gun being shoved into his arms.  
"Your blunder...bus."  
"Thanks again, Lurch! I'd tell you to take the day off, but I think I've got to save the world!"  
The man just groaned and slowly shuffled away.  
Fester brushed himself off, marching around another bog and through a sculpture lined path choked with weeds and dead brown colored plants.  
Normally the tangle of thorny briars and crumbling statuary filled him with a delicious melancholy, but now the only depressing thought he could muster was one about people being too lazy to trim, and that was just plain wrong. He used to love scratches and poison ivy just as much as everyone else, but now it just wasn't enough.  
Before he knew it, he was in the front yard, wandering up to the ivy encrusted fence with spikes his brother had artfully filed to razor sharp points.  
As he approached, the gate swung wide open, as if reading his mind.  
The moment he stepped through, a nearby mailbox popped open, and a hand handed him shells and a powder horn.  
"Thing, you're so...handy!" Fester said as he stuffed them into his robe.  
Eagerly expecting the worst, he strolled down the sidewalk a few feet, surveying the street and the block beyond.  
The block was quiet. Too quiet. Nobody could be seen anywhere. The only life he could see was a single Jack Russel terrier tearing open a garbage bag.  
When he returned to the front of the house, he suddenly heard a canine yelp, and a thousand black purple blobs rose out of the pavement, squeezing through the cracks of the sidewalks, popping out of bushes, poking out of gutters. Near the ripped garbage bag, he could see one of them swallowing the dog's leg, the rest of it disappearing inside the creature's innards.  
Fester backed up against the gate, fumbling with the latch, but it refused to open. He felt like a gladiator locked in a coliseum.  
"This day just keeps on getting better!" he exclaimed.


End file.
